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The Mummy star Brendan Fraser says what we’re all thinking about why Tom Cruise’s 2017 reboot failed
The Mummy’s Brendan Fraser says Tom Cruise’s 2017 reboot forgot how to have fun, and that’s why it flopped at the box office
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In 1999, Brendan Fraser starred in The Mummy, an action-adventure remake of the classic Universal Monsters film. The movie spawned two sequels, a spinoff, an animated series, a video game, and a theme park ride. So... yeah. It’s safe to say it was successful.
In 2017, Tom Cruise starred in a reboot of The Mummy, but the film was such a critical and commercial failure that it caused Universal Pictures to abandon their plans for plans to build a cinematic universe around the classic Universal Monster characters.
What went wrong? Brendan Fraser, who apparently knows a thing or two about making Mummy movies, has an idea.
“I know that Tom tried to make this movie,” Brendan Fraser says during a panel at Fan Expo Denver 2025. “We all know how hard this movie is to make. I tried to do it three times. But the essential ingredient in all of these films that we made was that it’s fun. It was fun. It was a thrill ride. You wanted to do it again, and so, the answer is you just got to give everybody what they really want, and if you stray from that path, it’s a different entity on its own. Heck, if it worked once, do it twice.”
Tom Cruise’s Mummy reboot may be doomed to remain in its sarcophagus, but maybe there’s hope for another installment with Brendan Fraser. Mummy films are all about the dead rising again, and maybe another film with the original cast would be just what the franchise needs to regain the box office crown.
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